20 Pinterest Hacks for Small Business Pinners

Yesterday, I posted 10 types of small business Pinterest boards. It also included 30 examples of what those boards could look like to get you inspired to try one on your own. Many of those examples came from members of the Small Business Bonfire in response to feedback on how they are using Pinterest in their businesses. And, let me tell you, our Bonfire members have a lot to say!

Small Business Pinners We Can Learn From

Sabrina Espinal nailed the essence of using Pinterest for business when she said, it’s all about “Pinning with Purpose,” thinking about beautiful and rich graphics placed in the right places on your website and blogs, then using Pinterest to generate interest and traffic. Very sound advice for any entrepreneur just getting started with Pinterest.

But that’s not all. Sabrina had a lot more to say, and provided a number of additional tips in the list below. You can check out her two Pinterest accounts here and here.

And there were other contributors, too. Here is a list of Bonfire members who are already using Pinterest to support their businesses and shared their tips to help you get started, too. The links below go to their Pinterest profiles so you can follow their boards:

Pinterest Tips for Small Business

1. Create goals for using for Pinterest, and work it into your marketing plan (if you want to avoid, chicken-with-head-cut-off syndrome, that is).

2. Consider mixing business and personal in order to create a combination of fun, eye-catching and promotional pins.

3. Or, separate business and personal into two completely separate accounts with different themes.

4. Share boards between separate Pinterest accounts to make it easier to pin in two places at once.

5. Think beyond visual. YES, you can still pin even if you’re not a retail business with physical products. Create your own visual elements that support what you do.

6. Remember copyrights, going both ways. Know where you’re pinning from, and always give credit. And, on the flip side, understand that once you put something out there on the interwebs, you can’t control where it goes or how it’ used.

7. Use video to add some interest and variety to image-heavy boards.

8. Upload your own images directly into Pinterest, and add a link. This is a great way to get around the inability to pin from Facebook. For example, we created this image and added to our Facebook Wall, then uploaded and shared on Pinterest, linking back to Facebook.

9. Fill in all of the information for every pin and board — category, link, description, etc.

10. Avoid the temptation to pin everything you know/want to share in one day (or one hour!). Create a strategy and space it out.

11. Pin a mix of things that link to your own sites, combined with links to others.

12. Use Pinterest as a way to do market research. Look at your followers and repins to see what other websites/topics people are you interested in.

13. Add a price with the dollar sign (i.e., $1) to the description of your products and services so they show a price and go into the Pinterest gifts section.

14. Check your traffic often to see what is generating interest, and then, most importantly, tailor your pins accordingly.

15. Rearrange boards often to help all of your pins get more exposure.

16. Make your boards collaboration spaces by adding contributors for group pinning and discussions.

17. Start thinking about how you can meld your sense of style and creativity with amazing graphics to make a big impact.

18. Use likes, repins and comments as a way to connect with your followers. Don’t be afraid to start a conversation by tagging someone in a comment or description of a pin.

19. Make your content “pin-able” and encourage sharing.

20. Absorb and learn from Pinterest, then share what you’ve leaned with clients and colleagues, in the form of pins, of course!

Again, a huge thank you to everyone who contributed to this post. Now, it’s your turn.What tips would you add to this list?

Alyssa is a small business owner, speaker, writer and collaboration-addict. She's a team player, a team builder and not a bad leader, either. You can often find her on various social networks looking for remarkable people to collaborate with.

Pinterest is fantastic and it’s NOT going away. I read an article in Fortune that mentioned that in February, it drove more traffic to websites than Google+, Twitter, Linkedin, and YouTube COMBINED. That absolutely boggles the mind.

Irritating, isn’t it, Meryl? I have searched and searched for a way to force Pinterest to recognize the featured image of a post (which is what we use on our blog), but I can’t find a way to customize it. I wish they would add the ability to tinker with the META data on a page to make the content easier to share (like Facebook does). If anyone knows a solution, I would be happy to hear it!

Like the Facebook problem … I worked around it by finding some pictures and posting it with a link to your article. I would’ve liked to use your pictures, but there’s that permissions / copyright issue. (Grabbing it / uploading it is different from pinning, I think.)

Hi Meryl and Lisa! Another alternative is the free Pin Anything tool from my business, Pin4Ever, which lets you take a custom screenshot when the Pin It button doesn’t work. The one week free trial also comes with free backups and more, with no obligation to buy. Another freebie is our Bulk Editing tools to let you move, copy, delete and rearrange multiple pins in one step. We’ve saved, edited and uploaded over 69 million pins for our customers since September 2012, so I hope you’ll check it out.

Karli

This is GREAT stuff! But I can’t for the life of me figure out how you did number 8. Can you help me figure out how to add a link to an uploaded image, without having to place the link in the image description? Thanks!!

I believe that tip was submitted by Sabrina; maybe she will weigh in with more specifics. From what I understand, you can share your boards between contributors. So for example, if you have two accounts and create a shared board with both of your accounts listed as contributors, you can add your pins in multiple places.

Hi, to answer “How do you do #4? Share boards between separate Pinterest accounts to make it easier to pin in two places at once.”

(Note: I’m using the words “first” and “second” to denote the two accounts…it is not an actual order of which account was set up first.

1. First, sign on from the first account and follow the second account and vice versa. (Example: My Sabrina Espinal account follows my Sabrina&Company account and vice versa)
2. Go to one of the accounts that you want to share boards. On the top right side menu bar, click on drop down under your profile picture and select “boards”.
3. Click on the word “edit” under the board you want to share. Do not click on “edit board cover” because that is the wrong edit field for this example!
4. Once you click on “edit” you will come to a new screen. Now, the third field down says, “Who can pin?” Click on “me and contributors” A field will pop up and then you type in the name of your second account” and click “add”.
5. That’s it. So just repeat that on each board.
This makes things SOOOO much easier for me. I can pin business things from my personal account without logging off and on.
Hope this helps. Let us know if you have any questions.
Pin me on Pinterest @sabrinaespinal or @sabrinacompany

Christina

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Creating a second account is easy. Log out of the existing account completely. Go to the Pinterest homepage and sign up as if the first account did not exist (you will need a different username, of course). All done!

Sabrina explained above how to get them to interact.

Also, you can open a board for other people to pin to the same way you get your own boards to interact – possibly something people who use your products could pin to?